


The World Coming Alive

by altschmerzes



Category: Gemini Man (2019)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Developing Friendships, Families of Choice, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Nightmares, Plans For The Future, a developing one at the very least, junior has a bit of a well-earned breakdown after his whole life crashed down around him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 18:54:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25800178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altschmerzes/pseuds/altschmerzes
Summary: In the immediate aftermath of Clay Verris's death, Danny, Henry, and Junior are left to find somewhere to hunker down, nurse their wounds, and wait for the worst of the firestorm to die down. Danny wonders what's going to happen next, Henry grapples with a newfound responsibility he's only just realized he's taken on, and Junior? When Henry had talked about nightmares, the three in the morning 'somebody please save me' kind? He'd been right.(You think you know what your life is going to look like. And then, in an instant, everything changes, and it's not just your life anymore.)
Relationships: Henry Brogan & Danny Zakarewski, Henry Brogan & Junior | Jackson (Gemini Man)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 10





	The World Coming Alive

**Author's Note:**

> what's that old saying. 'if ye shall not find the good found family fic you want after the PERFECT setup, ye shall create it yourself"? well, i did. and i'm not done. There Will Be More. if there's anybody out there reading this who was as swept away by that movie as i was, please enjoy!! i wrote this for us.
> 
> (des and orion - i especially wrote this for you.)

> _And the wind began to blow_
> 
> _And all the trees began to bend_
> 
> _And the world, in its cold way, started coming alive_
> 
> _And I stood there like a businessman waiting for the train_
> 
> _And I got ready for the future to arrive_
> 
> _\- The Mountain Goats, “Woke Up New”_

A person can get used to anything. Danny has this thought as she’s driven away from a burning building in which lay the body of the man who’d turned her world on its head in the space of just a few days. She’s in the passenger’s seat of a nearby car that Henry hotwired, leg hot and throbbing where she’s pressed a wad of fabric to it - what it had been before she genuinely doesn’t remember at this point, only that Henry had shoved it at her and told her to keep pushing down on the wound. He’s sitting next to her, bruised and bloodied hands holding the wheel hard enough she can hear it creak when he turns it, staring straight ahead at the road. 

They’re headed towards an address Junior rattled off after just a few moments of thought, his only answer a pointed look when Danny had asked him if he’s _sure_ it’s going to be safe. Henry hadn’t asked any questions at all, just plugged the address into the car’s GPS and started driving. There’s a frown creased deep into Henry’s forehead, a frown she’s come to recognize despite not having known him very long. It’s a frown that means he’s thinking, churning things over in his mind and making a plan. When she flicks her eyes to the rearview mirror and studies Junior, he’s frowning too, but it’s not a frown Danny knows. Despite the fact that it’s the same as the one beside her, save for thirty years separating them, there’s nothing in his face she can read at all.

Fifteen minutes into a predicted twenty-five minute drive, Henry seems to come to the end of his plan and start talking. He says, with a determined calm that Danny appreciates as the insane mess of the last few days has her reeling for what she imagines will be the foreseeable future, that they can’t risk taking her to a hospital. Not when things with the DIA are far, _far_ from sorted out, and there’s no way of knowing what kind of price Clay might’ve put on their heads before he was killed. A short nod from Junior confirms that there’s a well-stocked first aid kit at the hideout they’re headed for, and while there’s no such thing as a not-serious gunshot wound, the one in Danny’s thigh is far from the worst it could’ve been. She should be okay to wait out the couple of days it’ll take for it to be safe to either make a trip to a hospital or call in a doctor who owes Henry a favor. 

“You stick in this business long enough,” Henry says with a slight, dry distaste in his voice, “you end up with a lot of people owing you one. I was never really big on collecting, so plenty of people still do. At least one of ‘em should be in the area.” 

Danny makes a small noise of acknowledgement, shifting the grip on the half-soaked fabric staunching the blood and hoping that first aid kit has decent painkillers in it. Sitting ramrod straight in the backseat, stiff posture surely not helping the post-fight ache she knows has to have set in now that the adrenaline is wearing off, Junior still doesn’t say a word. 

In fact, the only talking he does is when they reach the house. The young man takes the lead up to the front door, disarming the security system and explaining in clipped tones that, once re-armed, it will alert them if someone breaches the perimeter of the property. Once inside the small two-story house, Junior shows them to the living room then disappears into the hall while Henry helps Danny get set up on the couch. She’s glad it’s one of those wide, comfortable couches she’s always found it far too easy to fall asleep on, because it seems like the bedrooms are on the second floor, and she doesn’t relish the idea of attempting to get up a flight of stairs right now.

With the aid of QuikClot from the kit and Henry’s practiced efficiency, Danny’s leg is quickly bandaged and she’s re-dressed in sweats and a large t-shirt she couldn’t identify the origin of if her life depended on it. Whatever this house is for, it’s well-stocked with just about everything an agent on the run from a bad situation could want, and she figures that, barring actually going to a hospital, this is the best wound care she probably could’ve gotten. 

In all honesty, even if it had been an option, Danny doesn’t think she’d have wanted to head to a hospital anyway. Not when it would’ve meant having to go there alone. In the last several years, she’s spent a lot of time alone, and she’d always figured she was fine with it. That’s the life, after all, right? But now, after going on the run with Henry, the limited but intense time she’s spent with Junior… Danny finds that, at least for the moment, the last thing she wants to be is alone. 

It’s been a weird couple of days. _A person can get used to anything,_ Danny thinks again, watching the man she’d been assigned to keep an eye on not even a full week ago carry a mug of steaming tea over to the coffee table next to her with the kind of single-minded focus she’s used to seeing in snipers taking aim. Somehow, as weird as things have been since she met him, things are even stranger now that everything has gone calm and simple. The world has narrowed down to this safehouse and the people inside it - to decaf cinnamon tea set next to a bottle of painkillers, to Henry lowering himself with a grimace into an armchair, to the faint sound of footsteps on the second floor.

Soon, they’re going to have to deal with everything else. The rest of the world will come rushing back in eventually, faster than she thinks they’re probably going to be ready for - which, isn’t that the way it always goes? She’s going to have to see a doctor and get the bullet pulled out of her thigh, Henry will need to have a lot of serious conversations with a lot of serious people, and Junior… Well, Danny can’t even begin to guess what the hell is gonna happen with Junior after this. She’s not even sure the kid legally exists. 

For now, though, those aren’t the problems at hand. For now there’s just the three of them in this unfamiliar house, the night outside wearing on long and deep. The meds Danny took are finally catching up to the head start the pain had on them, her body growing heavy and slow as the fire in her leg begins to die out. Though she hadn’t seen him take anything, Henry seems to be feeling heavier by the moment too, if the way he slumps down low in his chair, head tipped back towards the ceiling is any indication. 

Once he’d seen that Danny was settled in with sufficient pillows, blankets, and bottled water, Junior had made some excuse about being ‘really tired’ and vanished upstairs. They could hear him walking for a while, and then the steps had gone quiet, though who knows if he’s actually sleeping. Still somewhat keyed up from the vestiges of the adrenaline that had carried her through the fight and here to this couch without collapsing, Danny isn’t quite ready to sleep yet herself. Neither is Henry - _that’s where the ghosts are_ , she remembers him saying on the plane - and so they talk.

What they talk about, Danny couldn’t have said on reflection. Maybe it’s because of the painkillers dulling her mind to a hazed crawl, or maybe it’s that there’s not much substance there to remember. She’s had this kind of conversation before, in the dust-settling aftermath of the few major violent conflicts she’s been directly involved in before this. The kind sitting around with bruised, bloodied comrades in arms, strung out on the thready high left while epinephrine rapidly drains from your system, talking about baseball or tattoos or the little lake in someone’s half-faded memory of a childhood fishing trip. Eventually, their voices dwindle to a crawl and still. The only sounds Danny can make out with the part of her brain that’s still capable of focusing on anything at all are the tick of a clock mounted on the mostly-bare wall and Henry’s exhausted, laden breathing.

“What are you gonna do?” The question slips out before Danny has the chance to decide if it’s a good idea or not, remind herself that, tonight anyway, _the future_ was supposed to be a problem for _the future._ Once it’s out, though, she feels like maybe this is what she’s been wondering the whole time, dancing around and fixated on even as she rambled about something she’d learned in one of the marine biology textbooks she’d read for her cover or a song her mother used to love that she’s been trying to remember the name of for the better part of ten years. Danny can’t imagine it. What she would do in his place, this insidious hornet’s nest of horror and loss cracked open and spilled out over what was intended to be the beginning of a peaceful retirement.

Rolling his shoulders and sighing so deeply it’s like the weight of the last twenty years is pressing square down on his sternum, Henry shakes his head. It’s a slow roll from side to side, a ship-deck wobble that makes Danny’s medicated stomach give a nauseating flip. What he says eventually is, “I don’t know.” The tone snags on something in her, and she squints at him through the dim light of the lamp in the corner. The admission isn’t lost or scared or even confused. Henry sounds determined, looking not at her but at the staircase to the second floor, and when he speaks again, Danny understands why. “I gotta focus on him. He’s the priority now.”

It’s a kind of clarity Danny has never felt, the way he says it. She can’t come up with a response, staring at him blatantly and trying to imagine what it’s like, to know so clearly not necessarily _what_ you need to do, but _why,_ and have that answer be a person. Strangely, it has something of a calming effect on her as well, the longer she thinks about it. Whatever comes next, Danny thinks, eyelids becoming heavier and sleep rising in an inescapable tide to pull her under, she wants to be there for it. She’d like to think she’s earned the right to be, by this point.

Even as the draw of unconsciousness surges stronger, the sound of someone walking past her ignites an urgency in Danny. Her hand shoots out to snatch Henry’s wrist before he can get out of reach, grasp stopping him though it couldn’t be through force - she doesn’t have the strength left in her to even _suggest_ he slow down much less make him stop. There’s something she has to tell him, before she succumbs completely to blood loss, fatigue, and pills. He’s talking, but she can’t make out anything he’s saying beyond the low rumble of his voice, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Not when she’s got to say something, and has a very rapidly closing window in which to say it.

“He’s gonna be okay,” Danny mumbles, mouth feeling slow and clumsy around the words. She forces them to coherency, needing nothing else in this moment than to say this. Nothing else than for Henry to hear it. “Kid’s gonna be okay. We’re… We’re gonna make _sure_ of it.”

If Henry says anything else, she doesn’t hear it. Now that she’s gotten across what she needed to, there’s nothing left in Danny that’s strong enough to keep her awake. So she lets go. Awareness slides like Henry’s wrist through her fingers, and she’s asleep in seconds. 

Rest doesn’t come quite so easily for Henry. It never has and he suspects maybe it never will, not without some kind of chemical assistance, and that’s a slippery slope he’d rather not start down. So instead of grabbing a blanket settling back into that armchair by the couch Danny’s out cold sprawled across or taking one of the rooms upstairs, Henry does what he’s done any one of a hundred times over. He paces. He paces and he thinks.

The stairs creak softly when he walks up them, loud enough to make him wince but not loud enough to actually risk waking either of the safehouse’s other occupants up. Danny’s barely intelligible assertion from just before she’d lost her battle with painkillers and post-battle crash rockets around inside Henry’s head like a particularly forceful game of pinball. He’s thinking about her, and he’s thinking about Clay, and about Jack and Baron and Marino, but more than anything, Henry is thinking about Junior. Not for a moment since he’d first caught a glimpse of the young man - of his _clone_ \- in Colombia has Junior really been absent from Henry’s mind. But now his presence wails a klaxon alarm, drawing Henry down the upstairs hall to the only room with a closed door.

For a long, stiff moment, Henry stands outside, not sure what to do. If he should do anything at all, anything aside from turn around and go back downstairs, ignoring the sick, frightened pull in his gut screaming at him to check and make sure Junior is, for a given definition, okay in the hopes that if he ignores it long enough, it’ll go away. (Never mind that Henry has a sneaking suspicion, though he’s not got much more than a day’s worth of experience to back it up, that it’s not going to be that easy. That this need to know where Junior is, that he’s as alright as it’s possible for him to be, might never go away, might be a part of him as permanent as the clover tattoo on his wrist or his fear of drowning.)

The door opens slowly and, thankfully, silently. The window’s blinds are opened enough that the moon casts the room in a soft light. There’s not much in it aside from a dresser, an end table, and a bed. On the end table, set on the far side of the bed from the door, between it and the window, is a gun. Laid out on his back, eyes closed and chest rising and falling in the deep breaths of unconsciousness, is Junior. By some miracle, or possibly thanks to a combination of adrenaline fatigue and at least a mild concussion, he doesn’t stir when Henry walks in, pausing in the doorway and hovering there, keeping his distance but unable to step back out just yet.

Instead he stands there, shoulder propped against the wood of the doorframe, and studies Junior’s sleeping face. Something in Henry twists and rips at the sight of him, the same way it had done down in the catacombs when he’d gotten his first really, truly good look at him. _Clone._ The word had felt laughably absurd to think, moreso to say, but it’s undeniable. Henry has the same cheekbones as the boy asleep on that bed, the same nose, the same mouth, probably the same frown creased between his eyebrows. Maybe it’s some deeply embedded evolutionary instinct, some ancient area of his brain that recognizes Junior as a part of him, and that’s why Henry feels like this. Why it had taken him ultimately less than a minute to decide to throw everything he had left into trying to save Junior when the kid hadn’t even known he needed saving. 

Maybe it’s something else, though. Something more nurture than nature, but not in the way people usually mean that, the part of him that remembers how Clay had thrown him overboard and told him to tread water, broken Henry down to rebuild him. That part of him had remembered and then wondered with a revulsion so strong and sharp he’d nearly thrown up on the spot: If that is what Clay had done to him, a combat trained man, what could he have done to a _child?_ It’s already so easy for children to fall through the holes in the safety net, and that’s when the safety net even knows to be looking for them to begin with.

Features cast in moonlight, sleeping in an over-large sweatshirt he’d dug out of a cupboard downstairs, Junior looks so young. There’s a frown on his forehead, blood tinged on his lower lip, a hematoma darkening the brown skin of his jaw into purple-black, and he looks _so young_ it makes Henry want to march down to the car, drive back to that town, and pump Clay Verris’s body full of an extra clip of lead just for good measure. Anger rises so sudden and strong it takes his breath away, and Henry is so caught up in his own jolting lungs, the sound of his own thudding heart in his ears, that at first he doesn’t notice it. Then, Junior’s mouth twitches, a muted noise of pain or fear or something else Henry knows exactly who to blame for rising from his throat, and it’s very clear exactly what’s going on here.

When he’d said it, standing there with a flashlight in one hand, gun in the other, desperate to get Junior to listen to him, Henry hadn’t been planning to. But the look on Junior’s face and the cornered-animal posture of his body had shaken it out of him, because he knows how he felt when he’d looked like that, and suddenly there it was. _I’m talking those three o’clock in the morning, ‘somebody please save me’ nightmares,_ he’d said, feeling the words rip free like strips of scar tissue loosed from old wounds. 

Taking one step forward, closer to the bed, Henry freezes, lungs tight, cold shocks tingling down his spine. Junior’s head jerks slightly to the side, teeth gritting and hand on top of the half-kicked off blankets going into a fist. 

It’s one thing to know you’re right about something like this, but it’s another thing entirely to have it proven in front of you. 

Barely a few more seconds pass before Henry comes to the abrupt realization that he can no more stand here and watch Junior suffer like this in his sleep than he could’ve stood there and let him condemn himself to live the rest of his life with the weight of shooting Clay, and he steps forward again, voice quiet but firm. “Junior.” Henry’s barely leaned across the mattress and reached toward the prone form before panicked brown eyes are snapping open and a hand is flashing under a pillow. 

Briefly, Henry is actually concerned this interaction may end with a knife sticking out of his chest. Junior scrambles when he sees someone leaning over him, the blade he’s pulled from under the pillow flashing in the moonlight. He says something Henry can’t make out, a rush of disoriented, half-formed words spilling out in the pitchy, frightened voice of someone still partially trapped in a dream.

“Easy,” Henry says, holding his hands up, palms out, hip propped against the mattress in an awkward crouch. Junior’s only response is loud, heavy panting, the knife jittering through the air between them. “Easy, it’s just me. It’s Henry, kid, you’re safe.”

When Junior makes no move to lower the weapon, but nor does he lunge forward with it, Henry decides to take a risk. Pulse thundering in his throat, he reaches one hand cautiously out, persisting even though the forward movement earns him a hard flinch and a cut-off inhale. Moving agonizingly slowly, he manages to get a grip on Junior’s trembling wrist, pulling gently until the knife is no longer an immediate threat to either of them. It takes a little more persistence to get it out of his hand entirely, but Henry manages it, not taking his eyes off Junior as he reaches behind himself to drop the knife to the floor. 

The dull thunk it makes hitting the carpet prompts another flinch, Junior’s now empty hands flying up to cover his face. His shoulders jerk erratically a few times, an odd, muffled sound emanating from his chest, like he’s fighting to choke something down and force some form of composure. 

_How old was he when he learned to do that?_

When it pops into his head, the question nearly makes Henry sick for the umpteenth time in the last couple days, and it’s the driving force behind what he does next. He knows these dreams, these _someone please save me_ nightmares, and what’s more, he knows what it’s like when no one ever does, and this ends now. If he can do nothing else, he can do this. And so Henry heaves himself the rest of the way fully onto the mattress and reaches out to the trembling mess of a terrified kid next to him radiating pain so strongly he thinks Danny might be able to feel it downstairs. 

The possibility that Junior would react poorly, would freak out and run or shove him away, was one Henry was ready for, but that isn’t what happens. To his surprise, it’s the opposite. Junior takes the offer and presses so close to Henry’s chest he imagines he can feel a twin echo sounding after his own heartbeat. Quick, shallow breaths ghost across his neck, a sleep-warm forehead against his collarbone, and Henry has never in his life felt so out of his depth. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do now, now that he has Junior shaking in his arms, probably crying, if the small hitched gasping sounds are any indication. 

Henry’s hands have only ever been good for one thing. They hunt and pinpoint and plan and then they pull a trigger and someone’s life ends. They’re clumsy on a fishing pole, half-assed with woodworking, make typos when he uses a keyboard. All Henry’s hands have ever been good for is killing. He doesn’t think they know how to hold a traumatized young man, comfort him in the aftershocks of what was likely the worst day of his life. 

Like it or not, though, Henry and his violent, killer’s hands are the only thing Junior has left now, and they’re going to have to be good enough. At least he knows he won’t have much to come up short in comparison to - if Clay had ever held him like this when he was scared or in pain, he certainly hasn’t done so for years. So Henry settles his arms more firmly around the body seemingly bound and determined to rattle to pieces in his grasp, tucking one hand protectively against Junior’s side over his shuddering ribcage, the other cradling as gently as he can around the curve of the back of his head. 

“It’s okay,” he says, low and quiet in the empty, pain-soaked air of this foreign room. “It’s okay,” Henry repeats, even though it isn’t. Even though he doesn’t know how to make it ever be okay again. Even if he has no idea what okay _is,_ for them. “I’ve got you.” 

That much at least is true - Henry has him, and he isn’t letting to. 

Seconds stretch out long into minutes, and Henry doesn’t say much more than that. However out of practice his hands are with anything that isn’t a trigger or a scope, his voice is worse, never having got much use out of him in the first place. Junior doesn’t seem to mind, or at least doesn’t know enough about what comforting is supposed to look like to know he should mind, relaxing in increments until eventually he lays, boneless deadweight, in Henry’s arms. The crying, which had never been loud to begin with, another observation that makes hatred for Clay dig deeper into Henry’s very being than he thought it could ever go, falls away to silence and with it goes the shaking, until all that’s left is the occasional lingering tremor shivering through Junior’s back. He’s so quiet for so long that Henry eventually figures he must have fallen asleep, the only thing keeping his head from slipping awkwardly to the side the carefully bracing hand holding it up.

Not planning to move any time soon, even if the unnamable fierce, hot feeling seizing his lungs or the sleeping person in his arms would let him, Henry is left without much in the way of things to do so, with a sniper’s years of experience in forced stillness and the need to keep one’s mind sharp, he starts thinking.

First things first, they need to get this kid some regular people clothes. They can start sorting out everything else after that, but first he needs to be able to wear something that’s not some kind of tactical gear or borrowed out of a safehouse closet. After that, there’s the question of what sort of paperwork Junior has, what kind he’s going to need. Henry hasn’t got the faintest idea if he’d ever been to school beyond whatever Clay decided he needed to know, if he’s got a high school diploma or a GED or even a driver’s license. 

They’re going to need a house. Not an apartment, a house. Somewhere safe, close enough to a city that Junior can start socializing with people his own age, figure out how to be a person rather than a weapon, but far enough that neither of them will feel trapped or claustrophobic. Maybe by a lake or a bay - Henry really does like fishing, even if he’s terrible at it, practically speaking. Maybe Junior would like it too. Danny can teach him everything there is to know about wave patterns, if for no other reason than it’s interesting to know it, no relevance to an assignment or a mark. Just information for the sake of information, salt tanging the air and someone laughing across the bench seat from you.

He almost laughs when he catches himself. Realizes what he’s been doing, the plans he’s making and the implication of them. And then, in between one heartbeat and the next - his or Junior's he couldn't say - Henry can suddenly see it. The rest of Junior's life. It lays out in front of him like an unrolling map, like a promise he made a long time ago and just remembered, that he can't believe he ever forgot in the first place. A missing piece slotting into an empty hole he hadn't known existed until now, until he can't fathom it ever being empty again.

“You’re gonna be okay.” The words are barely louder than a breath, echoing what Danny had said so urgently earlier that night, all remaining strength poured into them and the grip she’d held on Henry’s wrist. “I promise, you’re gonna be okay. We’ll make sure of it.”


End file.
